This trope generally arises in situations where The Hero and the Big Bad (or some other substitute boss villain) are staring each other down, ready to engage in mortal combat. The Big Bad challenges the Hero to a duel, but then instead of said fight being one-on-one, as the viewer and the Hero might expect, the villain promptly yells for his ... GUARDS!

When Yhwach invades the Soul King's realm, he's attacked by the elite guardians. However, every single time one of them tries to attack him directly, Yhwach reveals that there is an unseen minion still protecting him.

Occurs during the Dragon Ball Z Abridged: The Christmas Tree of Might. Turles, the weekly villain of the piece, attempts to overwhelm Goku with all five of his supporting minions. It doesn't end well for the minions.

In Kill Bill Volume One, O-Ren Ishii seems ready to take on the Bride in single combat, but then has her personal army, the Crazy 88, soften her up first.

Inverted in the film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, where after Harry reveals himself to then-headmaster Snape, the Order of the Phoenix are the ones barging in en masse when Harry seems set to face down Snape alone.

The Avengers has Black Widow visiting Bruce Banner with assurances it's only the two of them. Then he shows a flash of anger because he "wanted to see what she'd do." (What she does is immediately point a handgun at him.) Once it's clear he's not turning into an enormous green rage-monster, she tells the veritable SWAT team outside that they can stand down.

Bruce Banner: "Just you and me", huh?

In Blade II, Reinhardt confronts Blade after spending most of the film in an uneasy Enemy Mine situation. With the situation over, they now have no reason to play nice and can kill each other. The villain sends in a team of mooks instead.

Literature

In the Corum series, Corum's meets Prince Gaynor the Damned for a showdown, and it goes like this:

Kremmen of the Star Corps has a Genre Savvy moment when confronting Gort, leader of the Thargoids, realising he's about to call for his guards. Fortunately Karla is there to Show Some Leg. Those guards who aren't killed in the rush are knocked out by Kremmen's Valium Ray.

Tabletop Games

Magic: The Gathering: In Judgment, Ambassador Laquatus pulls this on Kamahl, shouting a challenge in order to lure the barbarian into an ambush.

Villains in the game Badass have access to a Nasty Flava that is explicitly called this, which allows them to summon mooks against any Badass facing them.

Video Games

In Angband some monsters have the tag "Usually appear in groups" which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. If a unique version of said monster spawns, it will instead say "Usually appears with reinforcements." Orcs in particular like to appear in large numbers and unique orcs can be a severe challenge at low levels due to bringing dozens and dozens of allies to surround you with.

In Assassins Creed II, Ezio does this in the second-to-last boss fight, in the same fashion to the final boss of the previous game.

In the trailer for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Ezio makes his way through a cordon of guards to confront the son of Rodrigo Borgia, the Big Bad of the previous game. Borgia Jr. mocks Ezio and promptly summons a dozen heavily-armed Papal guardsmen, whereupon Ezio's allies also emerge from the crowd and the two groups charge at one another in combat.

It's played straight when you finally track Cesare down, though Ezio's Assassins being unavailable is justified, what with him being in Spain.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess does this wordlessly before the mounted combat sequence against King Bulblin. The King stands alone on a hill and beckons Link to join him in what appears to be single combat. When Link moves in to attack, King Bulblin blows a horn, summoning hordes of mooks to join him in the fight.

World of Warcraft: In the Culling of Stratholme instance, Arthas faces down Mal'ganis, proclaiming the fight will be "Just between you and me." Which usually leads the five people who have been shepherding Arthas through the entire instance and doing the lion's share of the fighting to go "Hey!"

This is particularly absurd because Mal'ganis will spend the entire fight not only ignoring Arthas and attacking the tank, but if the tank's doing their job, actually facing in the opposite direction from Arthas so that the rest of the party doesn't get blasted with his Carrion Swarm spell.

To be fair, this was a Time Travel revisit of an event that already took place, and in the original battle Arthas did indeed fight Mal'Ganis one-on-one.

In Final Fantasy X, in the first boss battle with Seymour, he fights alongside two of his guado servants. When you defeat them, he relies on summoning Anima to fight for him, though that is justified since he's a Summoner.

Judge Ghis in Final Fantasy XII; he also comes with a couple of mooks for your inconvenience.

In single-player Diablo, the Archbishop Lazarus is accompanied by two named witches; while this alone might not count as this trope (seeing as it can be considered a trio of bosses), the pack of Hell Spawn and Advocates that emerge from a disappearing wall does most definitely count.

Also worthy of a mention: Diablo himself is in a room with lots of high-level mooks, though he can be triggered by way of ranged attacks that leave the mooks out of the fight.

Actually, most of the unique monsters tied to quests come with a cohort, notably including The Skeleton King and The Warlord of Blood. All of the regular uniques come as part of a group of regular monsters of their same type, though that's more of an inversion as the mooks come with a boss rather than the boss bringing along some mooks.

Security Chief Vince, from Metal Gear Acid 2. When Snake and Venus encounter him for the second time, he mentions before the fight that this time he brought backup, at which point several of his men enter the battlefield.

An interesting inversion can occur in Fallout: New Vegas. You can challenge the Big Bad to a climactic duel, and he'll tell his flunkies to step off, so that he may fight you in honorable combat. Your party members, however, will happily stick around and participate in the fight.

Knights of the Old Republic has a somewhat lengthy set of sidequests that involve killing off the three leaders of the Genoharadan, a shadowy organization that influenced the galaxy through assassination, among other things. After killing the leaders, the man who gave you the quests, Hulas, reveals that he was the fourth leader and that he used you to consolidate his power by killing his rivals. If you don't take kindly to being used like that, you can challenge him to a duel, for which he insists you come alone. Hulas brings two lackeys with him, but you can display some Genre Savviness of your own and bring your party members. Hulas actually expects you to not play by the rules, expressing surprise if you show up alone, and saying "I hoped you'd be gullible but clearly you're not" if you bring your friends.

Likewise in The Old Republic, many bosses summon reinforcements during their cutscene. Generally, these reinforcements are significantly weaker, but sometimes you'll wind up fighting an Elite and two or three Strong enemies.

In Portal 2, when you arrive in GLaDOS's chamber for a confrontation with her, she reveals that she has several turrets standing by to kill you dead. Good thing you already replaced them with the Defective Turrets.

Joker: Please! Stop! I can't take anymore! You win, ya beat me! ... Hang on, did I say "me"? I meant me and these guys!

In The Kingdom of Loathing, each of the class nemeses will send their lackeys/bodyguards after you when you gain access to their respective inner sanctums on the Volcanic Island before you get to fight said nemesis. However, only Somerset Lopez, Dread Mariachi, nemesis of Accordion Thieves, gives the line nearly word-for-word. Your character is not amused.

"Hola, gringo. I had anticipated that my defenses would not keep you out for very long."

"This is it, Lopez. It's time to settle this once and for all."

"Sí, the great rivalry between the accordion thief and the mariachi. After so many years, it has come down to you and me, eh?"

"Damn straight," you reply, readying your weapon.

"You and me and my bodyguards. Bodyguards! Kill (him/her)." Several extremely burly mariachis step out from behind the statues, grinning and cracking their knuckles.

The animated film Hoodwinked plays this when Red Puckett confronts Boingo in the cable car terminal cavern. However, the "guards" (the ski team henchmen) just stand aside and watch their boss engage Red in a very Matrix-esque beatdown.

Ben 10: Omniverse had an episode where Ben tries to defy Emperor Milleus in a duel, only for Milleus to summon his guards for help. Unfortunately for him, Ben being an One-Man Army, that doesn't really ends up helping him.

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